A Comprehensive Review of Multimodal Emotion Recognition: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions

This paper presents a comprehensive review of multimodal emotion recognition (MER), a process that integrates multiple data modalities such as speech, visual, and text to identify human emotions. Grounded in biomimetics, the survey frames MER as a bio-inspired sensing paradigm that emulates the way...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: You Wu, Qingwei Mi, Tianhan Gao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-06-01
Series:Biomimetics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/10/7/418
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper presents a comprehensive review of multimodal emotion recognition (MER), a process that integrates multiple data modalities such as speech, visual, and text to identify human emotions. Grounded in biomimetics, the survey frames MER as a bio-inspired sensing paradigm that emulates the way humans seamlessly fuse multisensory cues to communicate affect, thereby transferring principles from living systems to engineered solutions. By leveraging various modalities, MER systems offer a richer and more robust analysis of emotional states compared to unimodal approaches. The review covers the general structure of MER systems, feature extraction techniques, and multimodal information fusion strategies, highlighting key advancements and milestones. Additionally, it addresses the research challenges and open issues in MER, including lightweight models, cross-corpus generalizability, and the incorporation of additional modalities. The paper concludes by discussing future directions aimed at improving the accuracy, explainability, and practicality of MER systems for real-world applications.
ISSN:2313-7673